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Comment by stuff4ben | Hacker News Reader

TFA says "...a total of 1.8x10¹² cells. That is, almost two billion (1.8 billion) cells."

Isn't 10¹² a trillion?

This might be a translation mishap. The Spanish word "billón" translates to "trillion", and the English word "billion" actually translates to "mil millones" (a thousand million). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

So, a metric billion?

As another comment says: Long and short scale.

It depends on language more than metric/imperial.

You are correct, it looks like the author used the old British billion (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion). Those are supposedly out of use now.

Goes to show, one advantage of the mathematical notation is that it is closer to universal.

Not quite out of use:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Curren...

Spain, a large portion of Europe, and many Latin American countries use it.

Aha, that explains it! Maybe the author lives there.

It's from El Pais ;)

Yet our cultures seem resistant to usage like "1.8 teracells". Is it too nerdy? Would it be more palatable to normies if each prefix had a cardinality suffix ("teraion" is not great...)

It would also be more informative to me to to see as percentage of cells as I don't have a sense of the scale of the cells-in-the-body.

Or maybe a relative scale. 1.8T cells dedicated to defending, compared to X cells dedicated to defecating, or Y cells dedicated to digesting.

All joking aside, National Geographic says there's about 37 trillion cells in a 70 kg (154 pounds) human body. So that'd mean 5% of those are dedicated to defending.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/how-many-...

The article opens with that: "For the first time, a study has measured the size of the immune system: if it were an organ, it would weigh more than a kilo and represents 0.2% of all human cells"

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